"For more than a century, scientific journals have been the pipes through which knowledge of the natural world flows into our culture. Now they’re being clogged with AI slop."

- Ross Andersen at The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/01/ai-slop-science-publishing/685704/

#TheAtlanticMagazine #RossAndersen #AIslop #AIethics #AIresearch #SciComm #JournalPublishing #JournalEditing #PublicationEthics #ResearchIntegrity #ScienceEditing #ScientificMisconduct #ScienceFraud #AIinAcademia #AcademiaIA

I'd not heard of Fengkai Group before I saw their LinkedIn advert. They're offering paid positions to be a guest editor for special issues in SCI- and Ei Compendex-indexed journals (the latter is Elsevier's engineering index). That's weird, I thought.

Csaba Szabo has heard of them: he commented on his guest post on Leonid Schneider's blog about uncovering paper mill activity, at https://forbetterscience.com/2025/05/19/a-sting-inside-a-papermill/#comment-762891, to note the worrying approach Fengkai made to him in May.

Christopher Tang got in similar email in June: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-stand-up-against-unethical-research-behavior-christopher-tang-eur3c

More than 20 of my LinkedIn connections follow Fengkai Group and several are connected to the LinkedIn account that posted the advert.

We all need to be careful not to legitimise questionable organisations by associating with them.

#PublicationEthics #GuestEditors #SpecialIssues #JournalPublishing #PaperMills #AcademicPublishing

Here's a blog post by @serhii & @Maryna_Nazarovets that I commissioned, lightly edited, and made a figure for, on how university journals can avoid having too narrow networks.

https://blog.doaj.org/2025/12/04/editorial-endogamy-and-endogeny-challenges-on-the-path-to-doaj/

#JournalPublishing #JournalEditing #PublicationEthics #InstitutionalPublishing #UniversityPresses #UniversityJournals #Endogamy #Endogeny #Nepotism

"The staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the journal that reports on health trends and emerging infectious threats, was also laid off. The publication’s storied history includes a June 1981 report that five previously healthy gay men were treated for an unusual pneumonia — the first hint of the AIDS epidemic."

MMWR has been an important public health publication for decades.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/us/politics/trump-administration-cdc-layoffs.html

[Edit: this was a cock-up. 🤦
"workers who produce Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report may have mistakenly received reduction-in-force notices because of coding errors in their job classifications." https://www.statnews.com/2025/10/11/cdc-morbidity-and-mortality-weekly-report-staff-fired/]

#CentersForDiseaseControlAndPrevention #MMWR #MorbidityAndMortalityWeeklyReport #USpolitics #JournalPublishing #ScholComm #MedicalJournals